The Retribution Broker (The Retribution Broker Series)
What if justice could be engineered, and no one ever had to know who arranged it?
Hale Mercer traded academia for consulting, but her work hasn't changed: mapping the hidden pressures, fears, and consequences that drive human decisions. She can take apart a betrayal like an engine, tracing every motive and every moment when someone could have chosen differently. Her models can explain almost anything after it happens. Predicting what someone will do next is another matter.
Then Hale meets Em Byrne, a sharp-tongued Irish therapist with no patience for platitudes or for the systems that rarely protect the people they're meant to. Em has spent years listening to women who reported, documented, and waited, only to watch the people who harmed them keep their jobs and reputations. So she built a private network of women who have run out of respectable options. Em doesn't offer healing. She offers retribution.
Years later, the man Hale blames for her mother's death dies in what looks like an accident. Instead of relief, his death exposes a secret tying Em to Hale's own family and pulls Hale into the Circle, where five women are waiting. Each has survived a devastating betrayal. Each wants something back: a career, a name, a sense of safety, the truth. And each has agreed to deliver another woman's reckoning, because a stranger with no connection to the crime is the one person no one will suspect.
Hale's job is to design the exchanges. No obvious motive. No direct connection. No trail leading back to the woman who was harmed. For the first time, her understanding of human behavior isn't just explaining damage. It's setting things right.
But people are not models. As the punishments unfold, small inconsistencies surface: a detail that doesn't fit, a story that changes in the retelling. Hale begins to suspect that someone inside the Circle has concealed the truth, and that not every target is as guilty as they were led to believe. Then there is Miles, the quietly watchful man she is beginning to trust, who notices more than he should and may know more about the dead than he admits.
Now Hale has to decide whether she is exposing monsters, making them, or becoming one herself, before the system she designed decides for her.
Darkly funny, psychologically sharp, and filled with fierce, flawed women, The Retribution Broker is a thriller about female rage, buried family secrets, calculated revenge, and the price of getting exactly what you asked for.
For readers who love intelligent suspense, morally gray heroines, feminist revenge stories, dark humor, found family, and mysteries in which every decision carries a price.
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